In “Explaining Morphosyntactic Competition” (2001), Bresnan claims that certain irregularities in the system of negative auxiliary verbs in English provide evidence that grammaticality must be determined by the methods of Optimality Theory, with lexical and syntactic choices competing in an essential way. The aim of this paper is to provide a derivational analysis of the irregularities, in which syntax precedes morphology, and to show that this analysis is superior to Bresnan's analysis in several respects. We begin by examining the phenomenon. 1. The amn't gap and anomalous aren't Most of the tensed auxiliary verb forms in English have a corresponding negative form, whose phonological form is predictable from that of the non-negative form. The suffix -nt is concatenated to the non-negative form. Tag questions nicely display both forms.
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